Shi'ites will be in power in the Arab
world for the first time in 14 centuries. So Iraqi
elections are indeed historic. But it's not for US
President George W Bush to proclaim Sunday's
elections "a success", even before the results are
known: it's for the Iraqi people, those who did
and also those who did not vote. The undisputable
fact is that apart from the Kurds - who since the
first Gulf War in 1991 have lived under American
protection - most Iraqis, Sunni or Shi'ite, voter
or non-voter, in public or in private, blame the
United States for the current chaos and their
"liberation" from electricity, water, jobs and
security. History may still reveal the case that
Sunday's elections under occupation, with rules
established by the occupier, suit everyone except
the long-suffering 27 million Iraqis.

Up
to 8 million Iraqis, about 60% of eligible voters,
are believed to have voted nationwide, although
this could not be verified. Voters in Shi'ite and
Kurdish areas turned out in large numbers. The
turnout in Sunni-dominated areas such as Fallujah
and Mosul, where the insurgency is strongest, and
where Sunni leaders had called for a boycott, was
substantially lower.

The
contendersThe White House, the Pentagon
and the neo-conservatives were forced - by Shi'ite
leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's brilliant
brinkmanship - to accept these elections, in which
a Shi'ite victory is assured. For many Iraqis,
Sunni and Shi'ite, Washington's endgame is not
withdrawal, but finding the right proxy
government: only the naive may believe that an
imperial power would voluntarily abandon the dream
scenario of a cluster of military bases planted
over virtually unlimited reserves of oil.

Washington doesn't even try to disguise
it, and in Baghdad, US-appointed interim Prime
Minister Iyad Allawi is widely referred to as
either "the man from the Americans" or "Saddam
without a moustache". In these elections, where
security was extremely tight - many candidates
dared not appear in public for fear of being shot
- Allawi benefited from three exclusive assets:
name recognition; protection by 1,000 heavily
armed guards; and US-sponsored saturation
television exposure (although most Iraqis have no
electricity at the moment). His campaign slogan
was "A strong leader for a strong country". Allawi
is a secular Shi'ite, but as a former Ba'athist,
he also appeals to moderate Sunnis.

Asia
Times Online sources in Baghdad suggest that the
newly elected National Assembly and new government
will be very similar to Allawi's: a mix of
religious and secular parties, all of them led by
former exiles. A "Sunni parliamentary quota" is
almost inevitable, for two reasons: Sunni voter
turnout was low; and Sunnis must be represented in
the drafting of the new constitution. It's
important to remember that the assembly itself
will not write the new constitution; instead, it
will supervise the drafting committee. So it's
imperative that Sunnis are part of the committee,
otherwise the constitution may be shot down in the
four Iraqi provinces with a Sunni-majority when it
is submitted for a referendum next September.

The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the
Sistani-blessed Shi'ite list that will capture
most of the popular vote, has officially dropped
its demand to negotiate the American departure.
This essentially means, from many a Sunni point of
view, that the Shi'ites will rely on the Americans
to protect them from the Sunni resistance, both
secular and Islamist - as well as from the
hundreds of thousands of disgruntled, unemployed
former Ba'athists who may or may not (yet) be part
of the resistance.

Ibrahim Jaafari, the
official spokesman of the Hezb al-Dawa al-Islamiya
party, founded in 1957 (the oldest Iraqi Shi'ite
party), the third most popular figure in Iraq
after Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr, the No 2 at the
UIA list and a serious contender for becoming the
new prime minister, has already spelled it out:
"If the US pulls out too fast there would be
chaos." Jaafari, crucially, also enjoys a lot of
respect by moderate Sunnis.

Current
Finance Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi, a former Maoist
and Ba'athist turned free marketer, also a member
of the UIA and strong contender for becoming
premier, has repeatedly talked about "realistic
thinking" in terms of securing Iraq. Mahdi is very
close to some members of the White House's
National Security Council.

And the
prize goes to ...Shi'ites swamped the
polls in part because Sistani told them it was a
"religious duty" to vote. It's unclear how far the
next Sistani-blessed government will go to dispel
the widely-held Sunni perception of the elections
as "a movie" directed by the Americans and
packaged to the rest of the world. The Shi'ite
leadership at the UIA cannot afford an enduring,
widely held Sunni perception of a
Washington-Shi'ite alliance. Things may get much
worse. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the No 1 in the UIA
list - who has ruled out becoming the new prime
minister - was the leader of the Badr Brigades for
almost 20 years. The Badr Brigades - trained by
the Iranian Revolutionary Guards - were the armed
wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Now they're rebranded
as the Badr Organization, a political party also
represented in the UIA. One can imagine the
volcanic possibility of the Badr Brigades being
employed by the Shi'ites to fight the Sunni
resistance.

Muqtada will immediately
pounce at any suggestion of a Shi'ite cozying up
to the Americans and denounce a Jaafari, Mahdi, or
better yet Allawi II government as an American
puppet. Sheikh Hassan al-Zarqani, the Sadrists'
press officer, has already delivered the message
in unmistakable terms: "The Iraqi people want a
pullout timetable, security, job opportunities and
social services. We will obey the new elected
government if it serves the best interests of the
Iraqi people. If not, we will be its arch
enemies."

If the US stays, the resistance
will become even bloodier. In the unlikely
possibility of the US leaving soon, this could
open the way to civil war and a balkanization of
Iraq. If the US leaves following a negotiated
timetable, an elected Shi'ite government in Iraq
will be more than empowered - a terrifying
prospect for its undemocratic Sunni Arab
neighbors.

As the Sunni resistance will
inevitably become bloodier, balkanization is
arguably the preferred Washington strategy - as is
widely feared in the Sunni triangle. Sunnis
mention the Central Intelligence Agency for
promoting suspicious bombings; Shi'ite militias
used in the leveling of Fallujah; peshmerga
(paramilitaries) used to fight Arabs in Mosul; and
the possibility of the Badr Brigades being called
back. In a civil war, the Americans would divide
Iraq in three parts - the juicy ones attributed to
US corporations, the rotten ones controlled by
warlords. Just like in a previous "movie",
liberated Afghanistan.

Iraq's Arab
neighbors, for their part (as well as American
neo-conservatives) are afraid by the emergence of
a so-called "Shi'ite crescent" of
Iran-Iraq-Syria-Hezbollah in Lebanon. What these
anti-democratic Arab regimes - Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Jordan, all of them American allies - fear
is not only the specter of Bush-exported
democracy, but first and foremost the Shi'ites in
power. It's no secret that the Sunni resistance in
Iraq gets a lot of help from inside Saudi Arabia,
Egypt and especially Jordan. Washington insists
"terrorists" move in total freedom from Syria to
Iraq. This is false. Islamists cross the border
from Jordan, with no hassle by American patrols,
then take the highway to Baghdad.

The
governments - not the people - of Saudi Arabia,
Egypt and Jordan all want the Americans to remain
in Iraq. For their part, competing big powers
Russia, China and the European Union are not
exactly displeased to contemplate, from a
distance, Bush and the neo-cons' clumsy attempts
to replicate the British post-World War I empire
in the Middle East.

It's the
resistance, stupidIf the Sunni resistance
is really 200,000-strong, as Iraq's chief spook
has announced, it is the resistance that will have
the last word. In a perverse twist of "reaping
what you sow", American abuses in Iraq have reaped
so such anger that nobody wants them to leave -
even moderate Sunnis, because everyone fears total
chaos. The Americans created the conditions for
the emergence of a hardcore resistance. They
created the conditions for the emergence of
suicide bombers. And they created the conditions
for staying: after all, now they need to engage in
counterinsurgency. As the Iraqi Islamic Party, the
biggest Sunni party puts it, even the resistance
does not want the Americans to leave. What
moderate Sunnis want to see is a detailed plan on
the table, with fixed dates.

Americans -
but not the rest of the world - are still unable
to understand why the resistance has become so
powerful. Every faction has its own reasons.
Ba'athists are longing to recapture their lost
power. Salafists want Iraq to be part of the new
caliphate. Moderate Sunnis want the restoration of
Sunni rule - which has always been the rule in
Iraq. Iraqi nationalists want to kick the
foreigners out - like they did with the Mongols,
the Ottomans and the British. That's why the
resistance is a relentless, ever-expandable
proposition, but always under a unifying umbrella:
to defeat the occupiers.

The Shi'ites may
be on the brink of power after 14 centuries. Their
premier electoral promise - later reneged - was to
negotiate a total American withdrawal. If now
their strategy is a "wait and see" - let's train
Iraqi forces to fight the Sunni resistance and
then we negotiate the American withdrawal - they
may be in for a rude shock and awe.